Gif Screen capture tools still a must-have tool for many bloggers and other IT professionals. Especially those that allow us to, with a couple of clicks, get a representative image to explain or demonstrate a step or an issue. Today, I will show you some free and freemium screenshot tools alternatives that you might not have heard about, yet…

GIF screen capture is way different from the regular snipping tool. For instance, in many of my articles, I use a gif screenshot tool. Why? Cause, a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when is a gif!!! A gif screenshot is often used in tutorials or between team members trying to explain a chain of steps to be reproduced. Sometimes is difficult to write about it, and it would take longer to put it in words. This is why a screenshot tool is so much appreciated among many bloggers and other IT professionals.

These kinds of tools have been evolving from simple desktop quick tools to cloud and file sharing tools, enabling a quick and easy access to the files. We keep watching people preferring the simple screen capture tools, especially for bloggers, as most of them are free, easy to use and it takes few seconds to get the job done.

You will find in the below article screen capture options for OSX, Windows, and Linux, other than the most popular solutions like Nimbus or Jing.

LICEcap is an original screenshot tool for creating animated GIFs by recording your desktop or a window you have open. To enlarge or reduce the main LICEcap window and the size of the GIF you want to record, all you have to do is edit the window dimensions. You can also specify a maximum FPS (frames per second) and pause and resume recording. LICEcap will help you record anything, whether it’s typing, a video from your PC or YouTube, or something you’re doing on Windows. Personally, this is one of my favorite tools, despite not being updated long time. All the gif screenshots in my articles at TekTuts were made with LICEcap.

This screen capture tool allows you to record a selected area of your screen and save as an animated gif. The GUI is nice and light-weight. It handles pretty intuitive but keeps a whole lot of options and editing tools to choose from. It is a more complex option than LICEcap, which covers additional features like editing frames, adding filters, slow-motion or yo-yo style. You can even add some transition effects, similar to those we can find in PowerPoint. In fact, the UI of this screen capture tool has a lot of similarities with the Microsoft program, which helps the user to easily adapt and start working at full speed with it in a short time.

GifCam is a handy and reliable screenshot application designed to record the screen and to convert the recordings into GIF format. Gifcam is a neat little tool. With a simple task: Record a part of your screen and store it as a gif. It does a great job with this, but there are a lot of additional helpful features hidden under the clunky interface: You can crop, cut, reduce, scale and edit your gif before saving.

GifCam is maybe the most simple screen capture tool available for free to Windows users.

Peek makes it easy to create short screencasts of a screen area. It was built for the specific use case of recording screen areas, e.g. for easily showing UI features of your own apps or for showing a bug in bug reports. With Peek, you simply place the Peek window over the area you want to record and press “Record”. Peek is optimized for generating animated GIFs, but you can also directly record to WebM or MP4 if you prefer.

Peek is not a general-purpose screencast app with extended features but rather focuses on the single task of creating small, silent screencasts of an area of the screen for creating GIF animations or silent WebM or MP4 videos.

This simple program lets you record a screencast then automatically uploads it to the cloud where you can share it with others or turn it into a GIF with one click. You can also integrate it with your own apps, using their API. There is a premium version available for OSX as well. This is another really easy tool to use. Of course, that you can’t expect additional features than those mentioned, from a so simple tool.

GifCaputre is another simple screen capture tool, really easy to work with. I mean, the name of this application is pretty conclusive with the aim of using it, and does its job. Don’t expect a bundle of features from it, other than a resizable window and some preferences. That’s it. A

That’s it. A straightforward screenshot tool. Unfortunately, Gif Capture is only available for Mac users, so if you are using Windows, you need to check other options, such as LICEcap.

droplr is a bit different solution from all the other. It is a cloud-based service, and with a simple click, you start recording your screenshots. But the good part is the way you are able to share the content among other users, team members, friends, etc. With the free package, you can take normal screenshots, entire page screenshot, and compose a note.

There are much more features with paid packages starting at USD 10, but actually, the free version is already well better than most of the all the other alternatives.

Droplr is a much more featured alternative and, unfortunately, the video option is paid. Still, a good option to those which wanna to share with team members or need some additional options that the free version doesn’t include.

What about you?

Do you already use some of these screen capture tools? Do you still use GIF or already using webm format? Tell us your story by living a comment!

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A father, a husband and a geek... Carlos was the founder of projects like The Tech Labs and Flash Enabled Blog. He is the founder of TekTuts He is passionate about technologies. Their main skills are in analytics, transport & logistics, business administration. He also writes about programming resources, trends, strategy and web development.